"cherry blossom" by Kacey Musgraves, Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Only for one week cherry blossoms bloom. The sakura or 벚꽃 are a delicate flower that is quite a spectacle both where they naturally occur in East Asian and where they have been planted. The peach and plum trees and magnolia trees are also beautiful, but the cherry blossoms when they fall like snow are quite stunning. But unlike the other flowers, cherry blossoms are the most delicate. Heavy rains, winds, unseasonable hot or cold, improper pruning of the trees all could be reasons for an uneven sakura week. And if the weather permits, the week ends with the flowers blowing in the wind like snow. 

EVEN IN NATURE TIMING IS EVERYTHING. The third track on Kacey Musgraves' star-crossed, "cherry blossom," compares the singer and her love to the delicate flowers that are supposed to bloom in "early April" but now earlier due to climate change. The cherry blossoms bloom for one week every year and then blow away in the breeze. Love too can disappear if it is not nurtured. In the loose story arc of Musgraves' divorce record, "cherry blossom" establishes the speaker as being worthy of love and a pretty good catch. Today's song is more upbeat than the previous track, "good wife," with the second track taking on a heavier responsibility in the dissolution of the marriage, whereas today's song the speaker shows that it is up to the other party to make it work. Today's song was one of the tracks chronologically excluded from star-crossed: the film. It does, however, serve as the film's end credits scene, but contributes nothing to the so-called plot of the film. While star-crossed is indeed a loose concept album, "cherry blossom" does serve as one of the few tracks on the record that build a somewhat believable relationship between the protagonist and her ex-husband.

TOKYO WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY. One rhetorical device Kacey Musgraves uses in "cherry blossom" is changing city in the cliché "Rome wasn't built in a day." On her previous album, Golden Hour, Musgraves points out "In Tennessee the sun is goin' down / but in Beijing they're headin' out to work" in "Slow Burn." While this line doesn't seem profound, it does paint Musgraves as more internationally aware than most of her fellow country singers. Musgraves has toured both Europe and Asia headlining and supporting pop artists. In 2019, the singer was accused of cultural appropriation and sexualizing Vietnamese culture for wearing a traditional outfit, only wearing the top half of the outfit. I'm not sure if Musgraves has apologized for this fashion faux pas --and the CNN article points out other pop stars who have been accused of cultural appropriation from Asian heritage--and it is not my job to cancel Musgraves or justify her, I have a feeling that Musgraves' mistakes come from a sense of almost childlike wonder at a big world full of people with different backgrounds that she became more and more aware as her music reached a bigger audience. It's that wonder for Japan and the sakura that made its way onto her 2021 record. The memories of cherry blossoms falling add much needed lightness on this otherwise dark record of divorce and heartbreak. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.

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